XV 



Cornfed Culture 



OLD theatregoers in Chicago still recall the stage cur- 

 tain at the Garrick Theatre, with its florid decorations 

 of ripe corn and the painted legend: 



The corn! The corn! Within whose yellow hearts there is of 

 health and strength for all the nations. The corn triumphant! 



The lines, as every Illinois schoolboy knew, were a quota- 

 tion from Governor Oglesby's famous speech at the Harvest 

 Home Festival of 1892. In the flowing rhythms of the era of 

 the Prince Albert coat and rippling whiskers, Illinois's chief 

 executive paid rhapsodic tribute to the crop which made the 

 state rich. 



And the state remembered the speech with pride. School- 

 boys learned it in elocution classes in country schools, and 

 recited it at commencement exercises. Their parents, mostly 

 Illinois corn farmers and their wives, filled the audience. Their 

 hands, hardened and gnarled by long service in the fields, lay 

 quietly in broad laps. Their minds were divided between 

 humble admiration for their offspring and a dim awareness 

 that the green crops in their fields had a value not entirely 

 computable in bushels and dollars. The corn they sowed 

 each spring and harvested each fall offered more than nourish- 

 ment for men's bodies. It had a cultural and spiritual sig- 

 nificance as well. 



America's cornfed culture is peculiarly her own. It has 

 dominated this continent through four centuries. We have 

 swallowed Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, German 

 and a dozen other cultural ideas. As wave after wave of foreign 

 immigration washed up on our Atlantic shore, and swept far- 



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